It seems the mad countess has finally won her bid for immortality — or at least eternal youth.

Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory has been a favorite horror tale figure in Eastern European myth since her demise in 1614.

Now she’s back, slated to cast her spell in dueling versions, one by Slovak auteur Juraj Jakubisko (featuring Anna Friel) and one by French thesp, helmer and scribe Julie Delpy, each following different instincts in getting down to who and what the powerful countess really was.

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Samuel Goldwyn Films has sent Cinematical a new trailer for Julie Delpy’s upcoming romantic comedy 2 Days in Paris. The film, which Delpy not only stars in but also wrote and directed, has criss-crossed the festival circuit for the past few months, landing in Berlin (where it was reviewed by Erik) and at the Tribeca festival. Delpy plays Marion, a native Parisian who drags her American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg) to her home turf for a romantic getaway. Once there, Jack has to deal with, among other things, Marion’s non English-speaking parents and her old boyfriends, who come out of the woodwork. Erik raved about the film in his dispatch from Berlin, calling it “charming, hysterical and sometimes gut-wrenching.” He also said that “if you’re not wiping off tears of laughter and heartache by the time the end credits roll … well, then you’re simply not human.” Wow — guess we’ll have to check this one out, huh? 2 Days in Paris is opening in limited release on August 10.

Click here to view the trailer.

Source: Cinematical.com

If you think there’s something ditsy about Julie Delpy, prepare for a sock in the mouth. She puts Ryan Gilbey straight on acting, men, and why her new script features plenty of castration

Julie Delpy smokes and smokes. She smokes so much she should consider wearing ashtrays as trinkets. We are in a faux-rustic restaurant in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, where she is promoting the sharp and funny 2 Days in Paris, a romcom with bite, which she wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored, starred in and presumably smoked all the way through making. At first I think the only time she’s not smoking is when she’s talking. But she has so much to say - she can rattle off an entire exhaustive answer before you’ve finished asking your initial question - that eventually the division between speaking and inhaling vanishes, and the words are tumbling from her mouth wreathed in smoke. It doesn’t sound very attractive, but remember this is Julie Delpy. She could be up to her elbows in offal, belching the Marseillaise, but she’d still have admirers establishing cults in her name. And chances are she’d still loathe that kind of attention.

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Before SIFF officially opened, I had already heard a few things about Julie Delpy’s feature directorial debut. First, I heard that it was almost exactly like Before Sunset. Second, I heard that it was okay, but the ending of the film ruined it completely.

Neither one of these things is true.

Yes, this movie involves a lot of dialogue between a man and a woman, and yes, it also involves a lot of walking around in Paris - but the similarities to Linklater’s film end there.

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